


everything is chemicals

by erzi



Category: Dr. STONE (Manga)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-24
Updated: 2020-10-24
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:47:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,075
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27162022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/erzi/pseuds/erzi
Summary: Still, that they have found any seeds at all in a world returned to its wilderness, with plants recklessly interbreeding while simultaneously undergoing natural selection, is—Not a miracle. That is an affront to Xeno's work, founded on science. Neither is it incredible; the word implies its happenings are unbelievable, and if there's anything Stanley has faith in, it's Xeno.No, that they have tobacco plants is just a damn good thing.
Relationships: Stanley Snyder/Dr. Xeno
Comments: 4
Kudos: 40





	everything is chemicals

With a crack like lightning bursting from him, and an inhale so mighty his unused lungs might collapse in that abrupt undertaking, Stanley rebecomes.

He had never ceased to exist. In the nothingness, where not darkness but its absolute absence prevailed—in there, he had thought. Kept himself conscious, his being _somewhere_. Still alive. Waiting for the man under his hand—if he remained as such, over all those hours he'd counted—to find his way out. Because if anyone would first free their flesh made stone, it would be Xeno.

And so Stanley gasps in a breath held for millennia, seeing a thousand shades of green everywhere. Even under his hand, where Xeno should be.

The first sound Stanley makes is not a cry for freedom at last, nor an inquiry into Xeno's whereabouts. It's a laugh, quiet, but so rich in this forest returned to unperturbed glory. He cranes his head over his shoulder, where his instinct, refined during his military service and never blunted in his quiescence, instructs him to look.

"I knew it," he tells Xeno, standing there, garbed in crudely-cut vines. 

His pride in Xeno takes a dent as he realizes that to counter Xeno's smug expression is an x-shaped— not a scar. A cracked emptiness.

More stone falls off Stanley's body as he fully turns around, naked and shameless as the day he was born, to place a hand to that emptiness, black where blood and bone should be.

"You alright, Xeno?" he asks, his thumb tentative at the emptiness' edge.

Xeno's smugness has never faltered. He tilts his head up to better look at Stanley.

It has always reminded him of a predator's canny gaze. Prey would cower before it, but Stanley is not a weak creature. He meets Xeno's eyes for an equal and is ensnared by them all the same.

"Quite so," Xeno says. "That is an effect from breaking free of the stone. You have your own mark, across your face." He traces the path below where it must be, because Stanley feels it, and the consequent shiver of a touch he's been starved of for years upon years upon _years_ , given without preamble. "It is strangely becoming."

Stanley clears his throat. He needs a status report; frivolities can be later. "How long's it been?" he asks, dropping his hand.

"Three thousand years, encroaching on four. To be exact, today is April first of 5378." His grin is as sharp as Stanley remembers it. "There is much to do, Stan. Are you in?"

He slicks back his hair, something vicious in the easiness of his smile. "You have to ask?"

Xeno, pleased, folds his hands behind him. "I have no means of paying you yet, but when all proceeds according to my plan, you will have your just reward."

"Money?"

"Yes, once we have re-established society to a point where finance is sustainable. First, though, alongside the urgency of sustainable agriculture, I will grant you tobacco."

Stanley's eyebrows go up. "You hate my smoking."

"I do. It's atrocious," Xeno affirms, brow furrowed.

"So why not have a smoke-free society? It'll be yours to make as you want."

"And have you complaining nonstop as you suffer from nicotine withdrawal? No, I need you, my right-hand man, at your keenest."

"It's almost like you're in love with me or something," Stanley jokes, his heart stuttering from three thousand years' absence of a cigarette and from what Xeno has said—directly and in between.

Xeno humphs, but the corner of his mouth is turned up, in on this little game. "I expect the others to wake soon," he says, walking up to a tree, tearing off vines from its bark and low branches. "Here, assemble this to cover yourself. Your subordinates should not see you nude."

"I think you just don't want them to see what you do."

Xeno's frown returns. "It has nothing to do with that. We must establish a hierarchy immediately—"

Stanley laughs again. "Yeah, yeah." He weaves the vines to something presentable and ties them around himself. He'd trained his team well—they would have followed his orders to stay awake. And if he is up, they will come soon. To a world of Xeno's making.

The stone cannot crack fast enough.

* * *

For all his years of smoking, Stanley has never seen tobacco plants.

"They kinda look like spinach," he says, resting a knee on the soft, dark earth.

"They do not. You just know nothing about botany. Tobacco and spinach are in entirely different taxonomic orders."

Xeno hadn't said it for an insult. It's only the truth. His honesty is raw, maybe even unforgiving, but it's part of why Stanley follows him.

A modest row of tobacco has sprouted from the seeds Xeno had scoured. None of these will be for consumption; they need seeds to propagate future crops if they are to maintain a supply.

Still, that they have found any seeds at all in a world returned to its wilderness, with plants recklessly interbreeding while simultaneously undergoing natural selection, is—

Not a miracle. That is an affront to Xeno's work, founded on science. Neither is it incredible; the word implies its happenings are unbelievable, and if there's anything Stanley has faith in, it's Xeno. 

No, that they have tobacco plants is just a damn good thing.

Stanley rubs a leaf between his fingers. Its wrinkled smoothness makes this all more real, and he chuckles. He peers up at Xeno. "You're amazing."

Xeno basks in the praise. "There are a few ingredients we lack still, but the plant itself is perhaps the most important. After we have a sufficient supply, it must be cured." 

"And then I get to be the first person to try it," Stanley says, standing, then running a hand slowly through Xeno's hair.

Xeno stretches into the motion, content as a cat. "It will be quite worth it, Stan. That I can promise."

"I know, Xeno." He dons a smile. "I know."

* * *

Stanley kills, Xeno creates; together, they advance into the new world. Their fibrous sewn clothes had added leather, and not long thereafter, synthetics. Stone knives had sharpened to steel, even then not as deadly as a gun. Now Xeno places one to Stanley's reverent hands, and a kiss is not enough gratitude.

Three thousand years later, love and its worship remain the same.

Xeno's hair clings to his forehead. Stanley, unbothered, combs it with his fingers, arm cradling Xeno's head. Sometimes, he misses, instead dipping into the emptiness where Xeno's skin should be. It's stopped feeling like it doesn't belong to become something intimate. A show of ultimate trust. Xeno doesn't even open his eyes at the near-desecration.

"You've given me my weapons and soon my vice," Stanley murmurs, "but you've not given yourself anything."

"I don't need any particular material thing. My end goal is to reform the world as I see fit. I have to keep furthering our technology to achieve what I want."

"You really don't want anything?"

"I really don't."

He smirks. "What about some _one_?" 

Xeno opens his eyes. "No. You never left me, after all. Who more do I need? You already know this."

"Yeah." He nestles onto the lithe curve of Xeno's neck and kisses it. "I just wanted to hear you say it."

"You're incorrigible," Xeno says, but he's smirking, too.

"Only because you're you." He stills his fingers. "In the old world, the only things I could count on were my orders and you. Not everyone giving me orders deserved that power." He shifts to lean over Xeno, casting him in shadows, the x-shaped emptiness perfectly hidden. "You do."

Xeno's grinning teeth gleam white.

Stanley dips his head, mouth brushing Xeno's as he speaks to the total darkness he makes. "Maybe you should order me around some more?"

That, Xeno has no issue with.

* * *

"What," Stanley flatly starts, "are you wearing?"

"These?" Xeno asks from his lab bench, waving the—claws? "They're for handling matter I'd rather not touch with my gloves themselves, as they're not disposable." The sound they make as Xeno drums his work table is tinny. "Why?"

Stanley leans against the door and crosses his arms. "'Cause I hate them."

Xeno glowers at him. "Good thing I made these for me and not you, then!" 

Anger has never fit Xeno; it comes across as petulance. And for all the years Stanley has known him, and then those that he has loved him, that petulance is only endearing.

"I _was_ rolling your disgusting cigarette paper," Xeno says, "but if you hate the claws so much, perhaps you don't need to smoke that badly."

"Wait, you were?" Stanley briskly goes to Xeno's bench, littered with inexpertly made rolls in slightly differing textures and colors. He looks at Xeno, a smile already helpless on his face. "You're this far along in their production? I thought there was still time left for the tobacco to cure."

"There is. So I have been working on the other components." He gestures to the rolls. "I tried various materials for the paper. Let me know which is closest to what it should be."

"I take back what I said, then," Stanley says, reaching for one. "Your claws are good."

Xeno harrumphs, but the irk creased in his forehead lessens. 

Stanley twirls the roll between his fingers. Scratchier than it should be; tiny fibers tickle his skin. He sets that roll down and grabs another. 

The unwashed wall of his old high school presses against his back as an older student, name and face rendered in shadows, taps a cigarette from a box to offer it to Stanley's memory of himself. Shrugging, Stanley accepts it, has it lighted, and takes his first breath of the poison he'll come back to again and again.

Like the person appearing from around the wall's corner, frowning upon spotting Stanley smoking. _This is where you were?_ young Xeno asks. _Getting into drugs?_

Stanley, brought to the present, laughs as he did then. He puts the roll on the table, directly in front of Xeno, and says, "This one."

"You chose quickly," Xeno says, picking it up and consulting his notes.

"I smoked a lot. It's been a while since I last did, but I remember what good cigarettes feel like."

Xeno's mouth sets to a thin line. "Yes. Of course."

It's not a dismissal of Stanley's smoking; those are always explicit, emphasized by all the harms, evidence-backed, that Xeno has memorized in vain hopes of dissuading Stanley. 

He rests his arm on Xeno's shoulder. "What's wrong?"

"I don't know what they're meant to taste like. I have a general understanding of tobacco's additives, but not a specific blend's ingredients. They won't taste as you remember."

"Well, yeah. But I really don't mind. It'll be your blend, and I've never had that." The backs of his fingers brush the underside of Xeno's jaw. "Besides, I can taste-test what you make and tell you what I think is missing. You can connect a flavor to a chemical." 

"I don't currently have the means to synthesize all the chemicals I might require." Xeno glances at Stanley. "It will take time to perfect your cigarette."

"Maybe, but it'll be something we make together, so it'll be worth it." He shifts to stand behind Xeno, arms wrapping loosely around his neck, chin tucked to its crook. "I waited over three thousand years to smoke, so what's a few more months? I can wait."

Xeno hums and reaches back to hold Stanley's cheek. Rather than warmth, or even the suppleness of his worn leather glove, Stanley feels polished cold. He doesn't jump—with Xeno, he is only comfort and trust—but he does shiver. Not entirely from the unexpected cold.

"See? They're not bad at all," Xeno says, throwing a sideways grin that should make Stanley immediately withdraw. It only pulls him closer.

Stanley twines his fingers between Xeno's. "I could get used to them."

Xeno tips Stanley's face to him, blunted ends of the claws indenting Stanley's cheek; the act is not unkind, but the feeling of metal digging into his skin, the possibility of his bones being clawed out, is not kind at all. It's evident in Xeno's eyes, glitter on their darkness; and in his mouth, curved up, bitterness forgotten. "I think you will," he says, and it's a scientific law as stalwart as universal gravitation.

* * *

"Mornin'," Stanley says, peeking his head into Xeno's lab.

Except he's not there. 

Stanley had woken up alone—nothing very unusual about that; the times Xeno rises earlier than Stanley's military-drilled wake-ups are because he has an experiment to run. What's unusual is that the lab would be empty.

 _Where did he go?_ Stanley wonders, stepping out into the hallway, going to the mess hall. Maybe Xeno is eating still?

He passes Luna, who gives him a wry look. Shortly thereafter, he comes across Brody, who laughs and gives him a mock-salute. He frowns.

From a distance, it's obvious the open entrance leading to the mess hall is dark.

"What the hell?" he mutters, approaching.

A white banner is hung across it; it's a flimsy barrier, but not one anyone has apparently crossed for the message painted on: 

_Unless you're Stanley, don't come in_

He chuckles and ducks under the banner. The moment his foot is on the mess hall's floor, the lights flicker on. 

Xeno stands by a table, a switch in hand, likely to control the timely lighting. His head is tipped back, a sign of self-satisfaction, and he motions to a seat in front of a covered silver platter. "Have a seat, Stan," he says.

"Did you stand in the dark waiting for me so you could turn on the lights?" Stanley asks, amused, as he sits.

"Yes. What of it?"

With an answer so unabashed in its honesty, Stanley forgoes teasing him. He rests an elbow on the table and his cheek on his hand. "What if someone else had walked in, despite the banner?"

"This other switch," Xeno says, pointing to it, "would have sent a small shock of electricity from their point of contact with the floor."

Stanley chuckles. "You don't mess around."

"I don't. I also keep my promises." He sets down the switch and unceremoniously removes the platter's cover.

Spices overwhelm Stanley before it's completely removed, revealing rolling paper, filters, and a tin of cured, shredded tobacco. Open-mouthed, he whirls his head to Xeno.

"The very first tobacco the world has seen in over three thousand years is yours," Xeno says. "You didn't roll your own cigarettes, but I thought you might like to try it. Once the taste is as you prefer it, I'll expand production—"

Stanley tugs Xeno down for a kiss, silencing him, needing to trace the shape of these lips that have given him so much already. He pulls back only when his body's basal need to breathe is greater. "You did it," he murmurs. "You really did it."

"Did you ever doubt me?"

He shakes his head. "Never. It's just that it's in a world where we had to bring everything back..." He turns to the platter, laughing in disbelief. "There are so many more important things we need to bring back, but here you are making tobacco—which you hate—because it's for me." He picks up a square of rolling paper, holding it up to the light, watching the individual fibers be highlighted, watching the light fall opaque through it. He moves the square over Xeno's face, then removes it like it's a veil. "Thanks, Xeno."

"Yes, yes," Xeno says, waving, as if he's not glowing with pride, "now try it, would you? I must know if I succeeded."

"Don't have to tell me twice." He puts the square down and sprinkles tobacco over it. Its smell alone makes his head spin gloriously; once he gets it sweet in his lungs, he might faint. He places a filter at the end and rolls the paper up. 

So simple. After all that time spent cultivating, waiting, harvesting, this is all he has to do.

He turns to Xeno. "I'm going outside."

"Oh? Will you be considerate enough this century to keep smoking strictly outside?"

"No way."

Xeno's look is flat.

"I wanna have my first cigarette out where it all started. In the world that took everything from us." He smirks. "Kind of like a fuck-you to whoever got us here to begin with."

Xeno's mouth quirks. "How very like you, Stan."

Stanley stands. "You coming?"

"How could I not?"

Around their compound, they've tamed the wilderness they had woken up to to make it theirs again. It's no suburban front yard as they were in American households; but with the dirt path traversing the far-reaching crops in neat rows, all tilled by their own hand, it's better. Stanley's boots tread softly, Xeno as soundless behind him. 

Stanley comes to a stop under a tree where the old wild remains. He leans against its bark, the roughness different from an old school's wall. "Ah," he says suddenly, straightening, "I don't have matches with me."

Xeno flourishes a lighter—a _lighter_ , in that notorious transparent tacky color—in front of him. 

"You even had time to make that?" Stanley asks, smiling a little.

"The case and fluid are hydrocarbons. They're important for synthesizing other products, so I had them available already. The rest of the components are simple enough to acquire." Xeno raises an eyebrow. "Really, Stan, it's as if you _did_ doubt me."

"It's never doubt, Xeno. Only ever amazement." He puts the cigarette between his lips and bends. "Light it for me?"

A fond sigh, a click, a muted crackle: the end of the first cigarette in millennia burns.

And so do Stanley's lungs. It's been millennia for him, too. But it's a smooth kind of burn; he keeps the smoke in for a second, then two, then three, each desperate heartbeat that marks its capture mellowing, remembering with a nerve-rich shudder what it is like to taste this.

He exhales it slowly, hesitant to let it go now that it's his.

"Well?" Xeno asks.

Stanley runs his tongue over his bottom lip, eyes on the gently sloping horizon. He takes a breath in—nothing of the smoke, just the crispness of the air untouched by man, and it is stale compared to what Xeno has gifted him. "Damn."

When he looks back at Xeno, he sees he's grinning. "How's the taste?"

Stanley chuckles. He breathes in more smoke, breathes it out when he thinks the euphoria and the lack of oxygen might kill him. "It doesn't taste like anything I ever tried before, but it's good. More… powerful." 

"Hmm. Makes sense. I air-cured the tobacco as opposed to flue-curing; you've gone a long time without smoking; and after millennia of evolution, the tobacco plant itself has changed." He pockets the lighter and taps his chin, adding, "Of course, there is also my lack of understanding in the exact amounts of additives used. How is the sugar? The acidity? The moisture?"

"It's good as is, Xeno. I'm serious. Just make me more, 'cause I missed 'em terribly and I have years to make up for."

"Duly noted."

"I'm surprised you aren't making more of a fuss." Stanley vaguely waves his hand. "Something about this being chemicals."

"Everything is chemicals," Xeno huffs. He jabs a finger at the cigarette. " _That_ is poison."

Stanley laughs, having to smother it to draw in more smoke. He tilts his head to blow it up, and it's as if it is the sole cloud in the sky. He speaks to it: "If you brought them back, you can't hate them that much."

"No, I do."

"It's that you like me better," he says—a statement and not a question—wearing a smile impossible to hold back.

Xeno returns it. A gesture and not words, far more meaningful for it.

Stanley takes the cigarette from his mouth, contemplating it. _Over three thousand years_ , he thinks. Then a glance at Xeno. Over three thousand years' wait for them, too.

"What is it?" Xeno says. "Did you think of something you want improved after all?"

Stanley places the cigarette back between his teeth. "What were you thinking about when you were in the stone?"

"The time; without a clock or calendars, I had to keep count myself. Besides that, I considered what I would do once I was free. Why do you ask?"

"Just curious." Smoke in and out. 

"Did you not think of what you'd do?"

"Nah, I did. Obviously not as intently as you, but I did. My primary concern, though, wasn't personal or worldbuilding hypotheticals." Smoke in… and out. "It was you. If I'd managed to save you. If you were fine, or stuck like me. What you'd do once you got out."

"I notice no 'if' in your last statement."

"I told you, Xeno. I don't know about God, but you? You're indisputable. We got thrown into a problem and I knew you were going to solve it." He tips his head to the compound: metal and plastic, agrarian and industrial. "And look at us now."

"I wasn't alone in my endeavors. Your skills are not in science, but they are as invaluable in our new society."

"Sure, but you're the product of years of studying and reading and experimenting. What you know is cumulative and broad. The kind of stuff that would keep setting back humanity's recovery if it had to be rediscovered, instead of jump-starting it already knowing what made us great." Stanley pauses, and idly adds, "You're too important in this new world. If we lose you, we lose everything." He plucks the cigarette away between his fore- and middle fingers. "My job's that much more important now."

Xeno grins. "Oh, don't stop praising me there."

Stanley obliges, summing his passion in a promise: "If anything happened to you, I would burn down hell itself to get you back."

"This from the man skeptical of God's existence?"

"Aw, c'mon, Xeno," Stanley says, nudging him. "You know what I meant."

"Yes," Xeno replies. "I do." His expression is pensive. "I don't necessarily trust everyone who's with us, but neither do I distrust them. We're sharing common resources because they bring something useful to us. While I don't think any of them would turn traitors, as we hold the advantage in this new world, I suppose they could because human greed is boundless. But you," he says, eyes refocused, seeing only Stanley, "are half of me. And would the self want to be one's own traitor?" He shakes his head. "No, it'd be a crime against nature. No more than the Earth can escape the sun's gravitational pull, you and I are bound."

Poetry does not have a home in either of them: Xeno is all science; Stanley is military might. But that they cling to their ideals like this, that they can draw upon them for what the two of them are together, is a certain kind of poetry, too.

Stanley wraps an arm around Xeno's waist and stoops down to press a kiss to his cheek. Xeno attempts to stop him, complaining of the foulness the smoke taints him with, though it's half-hearted. 

"You have to like the taste a bit," Stanley says. "It never really leaves a smoker, and you've had me around all this while, haven't you?"

Xeno goes limp and with a sigh stretches up, cheek to Stanley, allowing him his way.

If everything is chemicals, then what Stanley feels for Xeno is just that—chemicals, going to and fro in his blood, unseen but for their physical consequences: a smile; a thrilling and brief inversion of his organs; an elation at being tied to this particular man; a righteousness in knowing that though they had met as equals, he had chosen to follow Xeno as the one half of the whole who must be favored by the shadows. All of that, chemicals. That emotions could be dissected so callously is an ignorance most choose for bliss, but Stanley meets it, as Xeno does. 

Because if everything is chemicals, then he and Xeno are upheld by nature itself. And what greater proof of themselves than the natural world's approval? Elegant, Xeno would call it. Probably he has.

Stanley smokes, surrounded by man-made clouds and nature-defined devotion.

**Author's Note:**

> can we pretend that in the panel between stanley depetrifying and the rest of the crew, there was a Tender Moment between this little military-industrial complex ship of mine
> 
> -[this](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Spinacia_oleracea_Spinazie_bloeiend.jpg) is spinach, _Spinacia oleracea_. [this](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tabak_P9290021.JPG) is tobacco, _Nicotiana tabacum_. i also don't know anything about plants and stanley's thought was my thought until i googled spinach to remember what it even looks like, and boy was i wrong
> 
>   
> -cigarette tobacco is [typically flue-cured not air-cured](https://www.pmi.com/who-we-are/tobacco-facts/tobacco-farming-and-curing) but i think that'd require more shit and stanley needed his cigs Now
> 
>   
> -hydrocarbons are chemicals made up of a bunch of hydrogens and carbons in different numbers and conjugations. [plastics (there are several types)](https://www.bpf.co.uk/plastipedia/how-is-plastic-made.aspx#:~:text=Most%20plastic%20in%20use%20today,gas%20and%20coal%20%E2%80%93%20fossil%20fuels.) are ones. so is lighter fluid, which tends to be [butane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butane#Uses). the rest of [a lighter's components](https://sciencing.com/butane-lighters-work-4962894.html) seem easy to make, compared to re-manufacturing plastic from scratch


End file.
